Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  When the convoy arrived at the railroad station at Mauthausen in Upper Austria on a cold, clear Friday night, only 1200 of the original 3000 passengers were still alive. Another 180 died on the four-mile uphill hike they were forced to make from the station to the camp.

  Wiesenthal was almost one of the casualties. Trudging over frozen snow, with each man’s steps crackling thunderously like drums of doom in the silence of the night, he linked arms with a Polish prince named Radziwill, a relative of the one who later married Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ sister Lee Bouvier. For a while, Wiesenthal and Radziwill kept each other up, but when they couldn’t go any farther, they simply sank into the snow.

  ‘Are you alive?’ a voice barked in German and, to remedy this condition, its owner fired at them. But the SS guard’s hands were cold and his shot landed in the snow between Wiesenthal and Radziwill. Then the two men drifted into sleep as life and death passed them by.

  Well before dawn, the camp authorities sent trucks down to collect corpses and spare the sensibilities of villagers going to work in the morning. Frozen stiff, Wiesenthal and Radziwill were taken for dead and flung aboard with a pile of bodies. Simon doesn’t know whether it was the motion or the warmth of the other bodies that revived them a little, but when the truck delivered them to the camp crematorium, the prisoners working there noticed that both men weren’t quite dead. They carried Wiesenthal and Radziwill to a shower-room, removed their clothes, and immersed them in cold water. When both were conscious, though faint and dizzy, they were smuggled into the ‘death barracks’, where prisoners too weak to work were left to die.

  There Wiesenthal lay for almost three months: a hundred-pound cadaver who drank down his daily ration of200 calories of soup that stank. So did the barracks – with the smells of sickness, pus, death, and prisoners sleeping two or three to a bunk, some never to awaken. So awful was the stench that the SS men wouldn’t even poke their heads inside. A guard would simply stand outside the door and take a one-question morning census: ‘How many died last night?’ Later in the day, a crematorium detail would collect the corpses.

  ‘Sometimes,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘we thought we were the last men alive on earth. We had lost touch with reality. We didn’t know whether anybody else was still alive.’

  As Simon Wiesenthal lay dying in Mauthausen in the last weeks of the war, he used the pencils and paper he had acquired to draw the living (and dying) hell just outside the door of the death barracks. For the concentration camp, which supplied paving stones for Vienna and other Austrian cities, was built around a 186-step-deep rock quarry. Here, Jews and other enemies of fascism – Spanish republicans, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses – were worked or shot or flung to death. Only ten per cent of the prisoners were German or Austrian. On 31 March 1943, to entertain Heinrich Himmler on an official visit, a thousand Dutch Jews had been tossed off the rim of the pit to smash to death 165 feet below; from then on, the SS referred to this recurrent ritual as ‘parachute jumping’.

  In the first four months of 1945, more than 30,000 perished at Mauthausen: many from brutality, but more from exhaustion, starvation, and disease. Mauthausen was a slave-labour camp for men16 – and they died ‘natural’ deaths which caused the fewest extermination problems for the SS. By April, there was no water for washing in the camp. ‘We were swarming with lice and filth,’ a survivor remembers. ‘We would sometimes pull out some two hundred lice on each of us. When I would sit down and try to rise, I would get dizzy and see nothing for a couple of minutes. That’s how weak we were.’ After an Allied air raid, prisoners ate the flesh of fallen inmates who died when a bomb hit part of the camp.

  Rarely able to venture from his bunk, but allowed the privacy of the dead, Wiesenthal sat up to sketch the sadistic commandant, Franz Ziereis, who boasted of giving his son ‘fifty Jews for target practice’ as a birthday present and over whose desk was framed a poem that read:

  Shame on the man

  Who can’t strike blows.

  Heed the command:

  Beat to death! Beat to death!17

  He drew the stone quarry as the gateway to Dante’s inferno and later, for a 1946 booklet honouring the first year of liberation of Mauthausen, he captioned what it showed: ‘Building the pyramids was a preview in which hundreds of thousands of slaves perished. In the stone quarry, every SS bandit felt like a pharaoh. Just as in ancient Egypt, giant blocks of stone – never lighter than 110 pounds, by Himmler’s order – were carried by human bodies. An SS man sat atop such a block, cracking his whip to make work merrier – for him!’ Today, Simon Wiesenthal cannot bear to look at the pyramids of Egypt without thinking of Mauthausen and the tiny Jewish slave at the bottom bearing the wonder of the world on his frail shoulders.

  He drew a uniformed Hitler peeling off his moustached mask to reveal the SS death’s head beneath it. And a portrait of a larger-than-life Himmler etched into the brick wall of a crematorium with a long line of human fuel marching into the door of his fiery gut. With polemic passion, he wrote beneath it: ‘Insatiable, the death factory works day and night – insatiable as the devil’s helper Himmler himself: “The smoke clouds must roll toward victory! Too little raw material for the chimney! Too few dead! Too few dead! Too few!’” Between 1938 and 1945, more than 130,000 died in Mauthausen.

  On Friday night, 4 May 1945, the last SS men disappeared from the camp. The next morning, nobody came to count or collect the dead. An emaciated Wiesenthal, weighing just ninety pounds, struggled out to the courtyard to see for himself that there was no roll-call. It was a bright, sunny spring morning with a scent of pine in the air rather than the usual smell of burning flesh from the crematorium. Toward ten o’clock, instead of Himmler’s smoke clouds, a big grey tank with a white star on its side rolled in flying an American flag from its turret.

  ‘Every star was a star of hope,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘I was about a hundred fifty yards away from the first tank, but I wanted to touch one of those stars.’ From the death barracks staggered other living corpses, waving their own long-hidden national flags or newly woven versions of the Stars and Stripes. ‘I had survived to see this day, but I couldn’t make the last fifty yards.’ When his knees crumpled, he fell on his face.

  An American GI in green combat fatigues lifted him up. Wiesenthal couldn’t speak, couldn’t even move his mouth, but he pointed to the tank and was brought to it. Touching the white star of hope on the cold grey armour, he fainted into freedom for the ninth liberation of his life.

  8

  Mornings in Mauthausen

  Upon seeing the skeletons who staggered out to greet them on 5 May 1945, the Americans of the 65th Division who rode to Mauthausen’s rescue had requisitioned every potato in the area. For many that they ‘saved’, however, it was already too late. Some 3000 inmates died in the weeks after the liberation of Mauthausen. Some were too weak or sick to recover from their ordeal. Others left the camp too soon, for one had to be strong to survive in war-ravaged Europe.

  Simon Wiesenthal awoke on his bunk to the aroma of real soup. It was so delicious that he took too much of it – and threw up. But he survived his good fortune and the American medics nursed him back to health. ‘Others were not so lucky,’ he says. ‘There were those who died because they were being helped. The Americans gave out canned lard and corned beef, which can be fetal in big doses to those who have been living on four hundred calories a day. So they survived hell only to die at the gate of paradise.’

  No sooner could he navigate on his own, after about ten days, than he set out for a walk in the surrounding countryside. Past a pastoral scene of children playing and farmers tilling their soil, he strolled towards the village until, after not quite a mile, he felt weak and fatigued. At a farmhouse, he asked for a glass of water and was given grape juice by a strapping Austrian peasant woman who could tell, by one glance at his gaunt face and loose clothes, whence this scarecrow hailed. Nodding in the direction of the camp, she asked him: ‘Was it bad over there?’


  ‘Be glad you didn’t see the camp from the inside,’ Wiesenthal told her.

  ‘Why should I have seen it?’ she said. ‘I’m not a Jew.’

  Wiesenthal winced with what he calls Merz Schmerz: the pain caused by first fulfilment of Rottenführer Mcrz’s prophecy, in Poland less than a year earlier, that nobody after the war would care to believe his testimony. He drank his grape juice and left.

  Implicit in the response of this woman – relatively well fed, but generous and surely not guilty of any wrong-doing – was a prevailing attitude of ‘this is what happens to Jews’ and ‘this is what happens to the rest of us’. But the Merz Schmerz that the Upper Austrian farm woman unwittingly handed to Simon to digest with his cup of grape juice was part of the potion that transformed a ninety-six-pound victim and survivor of the Holocaust into its avenging archangel.

  In the weeks, months, and years to come, Wiesenthal would hear many Austrians and ‘good Germans’ volunteering to him that they ‘knew nothing about what was happening’ or had even ‘saved some Jews’. To this, his private reaction is vehement:

  ‘If all the Jews had been saved that I was told about in those first few months, there would have been more Jews alive at the end of the war than when it began. I also stop believing after a while when people try to convince me they knew absolutely nothing. Maybe they knew not the whole truth about what went on inside the death camps. But all of them must have noticed something after Hitler invaded Austria on March eleventh, 1938. They couldn’t help seeing Jewish neighbours taken away by men in black SS uniforms. Their children came home from school and reported that their Jewish classmates had been kicked out. They saw the swastikas on the broken windows of looted Jewish stores. They had to walk around the rubble of synagogues destroyed during Kristallnacht in 1938. People knew what was going on, although many were ashamed and chose to look the other way so they wouldn’t see too much. Soldiers and officers on leave from the eastern front came home and talked about massacres of the Jews there. People knew much more than they admitted, even to themselves, which is why today so many suffer from an acute sense of guilt.’ Wiesenthal’s words are as good a diagnosis as any of what is now known in Austria as Waldheimer’s Disease.

  Retreating from the traumas of Merz Schmerz and pre-Waldheimer’s Disease, Wiesenthal returned to the Mauthausen camp, where a new blow awaited him. The stronger survivors who had no place to go yet were running the barracks. A Polish trusty named Kazimierz Rusinek pounced on Simon for no good reason and knocked him unconscious. When Wiesenthal woke up, friends had carried him to his bunk. ‘What has he got against you?’ one of them asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Simon said. ‘Maybe he’s angry because I’m still alive.’

  His friends told him: ‘You must report this to the Americans.’. . . ‘We’re no longer sub-humans; we’re free men.’. . . ‘We’ll go with you tomorrow, when you’re feeling a little better.’

  Wiesenthal agreed to go because ‘if you can beat a skeleton, what else could such a person have done?’ When they went to the camp headquarters next morning, the commander, Colonel Richard Seibel, listened and said: ‘We have a special branch for that. It’s called War Crimes.’

  At an office with a handwritten sign, a young lieutenant named Mann heard Wiesenthal’s story, his witnesses, and the words of a doctor who’d treated him. ‘You’ll hear from us,’ the officer said brusquely.

  That night in the barracks, Rusinek apologized to Wiesenthal before all his friends and extended his hand. Wiesenthal accepted his apology, but did not give him his hand. Though Rusinek later became communist Poland’s Vice-Minister of Culture and a leading anti-Semitic propagandist, Simon says that at the time ‘he wasn’t important. He was already part of the past. What was important was what else I’d seen at the War Crimes office: SS men being interrogated by the Americans, begging cigarettes from their captors, being guarded and translated by former prisoners, and cringing whenever their paths crossed a Jew’s. One of them used to whip us in the face if we didn’t get out of his way fast enough; now he was trembling, just as we had trembled before him. I had seen nervous German soldiers before, but never a frightened SS man. I used to think of the SS as the strong men, the élite, of a perverted regime. But now I saw that supermen become cowards in the moment they are no longer protected by guns. Only two weeks had gone by and the élite of the Thousand Year Reich were fighting each other for cigarette butts.’

  A few days later, he went to the War Crimes Office to thank Lieutenant Mann and offer his services. The young officer listened to him sympathetically, but pointed out that Simon had no investigatory experience. And besides, he added, ‘How much do you weigh?’

  ‘Fifty-six kilos [123 lbs],’ Wiesenthal lied.

  Laughing, the lieutenant told him: ‘Wiesenthal, go take it easy for a while and come back and see me when you really do weigh fifty-six kilos.’

  The Americans tried to persuade him to return to Poland, where architects were sorely needed. ‘First you’ll be sent to a sanatorium to build you up,’ they told him. ‘Then you’ll go home and build houses for people who need them.’ His home city of Lvov, however, was already being absorbed into the Soviet Union, where he knew private housing had no priority at all. But that wasn’t why he told them thank you, but no, thank you.

  ‘Every house I built is gone. I have lost my mother, my father, my wife, and ninety relatives in Poland,’ he explained. ‘Poland is for me a cemetery. Every tree, every stone would remind me of whole tragedies. How can you ask me to live in a cemetery?’

  The image he used was hardly amiss, for Poland was worse than a cemetery for many like him. Even though the Poles had lost the second-highest number put to death by the Nazis (three million, including half of those who had higher educations), anti-Semitism was even more rampant among the living than before the war. Jewish survivors were shunned as ghosts returning from the dead to reclaim property that Poles had long since appropriated.

  In his definitive 1985 chronicle of The Holocaust, the Oxford historian Martin Gilbert – who also co-scripted the 1983 Academy Award-winning documentary Genocide for the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles – writes that ‘within seven months of the end of the war in Europe, and after a year in which no German soldier was on Polish soil, 350 Jews had been murdered in Poland.’ Among them were Chaim Hirszman, one of the only two miraculous survivors of Belzec (where Wiesenthal’s mother and half a million others perished in 1942), and five survivors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen – one of them a twenty-two-year-old woman – who were flagged down at what looked like a police checkpoint along the main road to Nowy Targ on Easter Sunday of 1946, ordered out of their car, shot to death on the spot, stripped of their clothes, and left naked on the highway. Their uniformed killers were former Polish partisans.

  No wonder that, learning of these events and even losing an acquaintance or two in Poland’s postwar holocaust, Simon Wiesenthal saw his native land as one vast Jewish cemetery. What he didn’t know yet was that the casualty who mattered most to him, his young wife Cyla, was alive in that cemetery.

  As ‘Irena Kowalska’, Cyla hadn’t died in the German attack on Topiel Street after the Warsaw uprising; she had slipped away into darkness a few minutes before flame-throwers illuminated and incinerated the whole block. When the battle was over and survivors rounded up, she, as a ‘Gentile’, had ‘only’ been deported to forced labour in a German machine-gun factory near Gelsenkirchen, which was liberated by the British on 11 April 1945, while her ‘late’ husband lay dying in Mauthausen.

  Having believed for almost a year that her husband had slashed his wrists in Gestapo custody, Cyla Wiesenthal told the British authorities that she was not Irena Kowalska, but a Jew and the widow of an architect named Simon Wiesenthal. At British headquarters, she was persuaded she had no choice other than to return to Lvov and begin life anew in Soviet Russia. She was given a railroad ticket and, in June, she and a woman friend headed behind the Iro
n Curtain on a journey which, if completed, surely would have been one-way. At one point, they passed within thirty miles of Simon.

  With a little weight under his belt and some improvised rouge on his cheeks to give an illusion of good health, Simon Wiesenthal applied again to the War Crimes office at Mauthausen.

  ‘Hey, Wiesenthal!’ Lieutenant Mann greeted him. ‘Did that Polish fella beat you up again? Your face is all red.’

  Wiesenthal assured him he would heal overnight and came to the point: ‘You liberated me, you saved my life, but I don’t know what to do with my life. I have nobody and nothing to live for, but I could find a meaning for my life by helping you with your work. I’ve seen a lot and I have a good memory. Men and women have been murdered before my eyes. I can give you names and dates and sometimes addresses. I can help you find the criminals and, when you interrogate them, the most important thing is to ask the right questions – and those I have.’

  Mann had him write a letter to Colonel Seibel, to which he appended accounts of crimes he had witnessed or learned about. To Simon’s own amazement, his chronicle contained ‘the names of ninety-one men who had to be brought to trial if my need for justice was to be satisfied.’

  Three weeks after the liberation of Mauthausen, Simon was accepted. He was sent out with a US Army captain and his jeep-driver to patrol the Mauthausen area for former SS guards from the camp who were hiding in the countryside. ‘You didn’t have to go far,’ he remembers. ‘You almost stumbled over them.’ After a while, the captain, bored with the sameness of it all and tired of plucking quavering ex-supermen from their wives or girlfriends, would send Simon inside to make the arrests.

  Wiesenthal’s first ‘client’ had the everyday name of Schmidt. Taking him into custody was almost situation comedy. Schmidt lived up two steep flights of stairs, and Wiesenthal arrived out of breath to arrest him. On the way down, Wiesenthal – still weak from the ordeals Schmidt and his superiors had inflicted on him at Mauthausen – felt so faint that he had to sit down hard on a step. After a couple of minutes, ‘Schmidt helped me as we walked down the stairway together. He could have easily tried to run away. If he had given me a slight shove, I would have fallen down the stairs and he could have escaped out the back door. But Schmidt didn’t even think of running away. Instead, he held me by the arm and helped me down. It was absurd – like a rabbit carrying a hunting-dog.’